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Big Boys Don’t Cry, Do They?

IN the next few days, Representative John Boehner will officially become the new speaker of the House of Representatives. While the Ohio Republican is not a universally recognized figure, people tend to know two things about him. The first is that his skin has an oddly orange-ish tinge, which some have attributed to quality time with tanning products. Mr. Boehner denies artificially enhancing his hue, and on “60 Minutes” recently, responding to the orangeness issue even brought him to tears.

That is the other thing people know about Mr. Boehner. He cries, and with a frequency some find unsettling. Much has been made of this. Fun has been had at his expense.

But there are those who suggest that this great nation and its pundits should give the guy a break.

“I think it is ridiculous and insensitive,” said Dan Rather, the former anchor of CBS News and a man who has been known to shed a public tear. “And I certainly don’t agree with him about lots of things.”

In the interests of full disclosure, your correspondent has, in recent years, become something of a weeper himself. Things that have made me cry in the last year or so, in no particular order, include:

“King Lear.” When I saw it a few decades ago, it was grand and very sad. Now that I have aging parents and children whose own mortality is all too real, a 2008 performance on a New Jersey stage felt like a different play entirely. I lost it.

The “It gets better” videos intended to reassure gay teens, except for the one by President Obama, which is inspiring, but, you know, a little lame.

With Mr. Boehner’s tears in the news, and my own very much on my mind, I sought out psychologists who study emotions to find out if the waterworks of middle age should be thought of as weird.

While medical crises like a stroke can tear down the retaining walls that keep our emotions from spilling out, they said, many men find that by their 40s they are simply more likely to be moved to tears than at any time since childhood’s skinned knees.

“Crying is a normal response to many different kinds of emotional situations,” said Randolph R. Cornelius, the chair of the psychology department at Vassar College. “There is no need to seek therapy for the sake of a few tears.”

Professor Cornelius has studied the subject for 30 years and said each of us has a different propensity to cry. “As some men get older, they find it easier to let their guard down and cry in the presence of others.” This, he said, includes himself, “a relatively high-frequency-crying kind of guy.”

“I can’t tell whether my lower threshold is due to getting older or simply feeling it’s O.K. to cry because I consider it a very healthy reaction to both the horrors and joys of the world,” he said.

Photo

Clockwise from top left: John Boehner at a statue unveiling, on “60 Minutes,” talking about Iraq and on election night.Credit
Bottom Left, Jim Young/Reuters

Another expert, Jonathan Rottenberg at the University of South Florida, cited research in an e-mail interview that suggests “people generally have a greater capability for complex, mixed emotional states in adulthood.” Babies, he said, “cry out of simple motives to attract a caregiver when they are alone, hungry, or in pain.” But adults cloud up while happy or angry, or when overcome by bittersweet blends like nostalgia.

Which brings us back to Mr. Rather, who said it was time to let men have a good cry, and without regret. “Like many American boys and men, I was taught big boys don’t cry,” he said, but our ancestors knew better. “In ancient Greek culture, men were allowed their emotions,” he said. In works like “The Odyssey,” “it was very common for men to show their emotions — it was considered even part of the heroic character and personality.”

Crying, he said, is “genuine. It’s authentic.” And, Mr. Rather said gravely, “We live in a society where authenticity is very hard to come by.”

He said that until he was “well past my 40s,” he could not remember crying in public aside from his parent’s funerals. Since then the tears have come with greater frequency — whether on national television, as when he broke down on David Letterman’s show soon after the 9/11 attacks or during speeches, when he often asks for a moment of silence to remember American troops around the world and at risk.

At the time of the Letterman appearance, Mr. Rather recalled, he had been reporting the tragic story nonstop, “laser-beam focused on the work at hand,” with little sleep and no chance to decompress. Sitting as a guest on the program, he said, “I stepped out of my role as anchor and journalist” and the emotions “slipped up on me.”

And, he asks today, so what? “That was pure, unadulterated grief,” Mr. Rather recalled. “There’s no apologizing for grief.”

Blubbering, then, is nothing to be ashamed of — even though we may still feel a little shamefaced about it. Robert Krulwich, the journalist and co-host of “Radiolab” on NPR, said that he was recently moved to tears in the office, while watching a video of college performers doing a work of interpretive dance based on a beloved segment from his program, “Goat on a Cow.”

Seeing someone else transpose the piece so successfully into a different medium caught him utterly by surprise. “Something broke inside me,” he said. “I don’t understand it. It was beautiful, really beautiful, in a completely new way. And it was so wonderful I started to cry.”

It was at that moment, in mid-cascade, that a delegation of NPR brass stopped by Mr. Krulwich’s desk to say hello.

“As they approached my cubicle, I rotated so they couldn’t see me,” he said, and pressed the phone to his ear. “I pretended to be writing,” and waved them off so that they would not see his tear-streaked face.

“Unfortunately, I did not have a utensil,” he recalled, so “I was taking notes the way Marcel Marceau might have been taking notes,” scribbling nothing with nothing and hoping the visitors would not notice. After an uncomfortable moment, they moved on.